Lip Sync will be the death of live music performance – Telegraph

Seems every news outlet is making a big deal of Beyoncé lip syncing, like this is some new phenomenon. The problem has existed for quite some time, but it only seems to manifest when an artist lip syncs poorly. Maybe Beyoncé didn’t practice, shame on her if she didn’t.

The public at large has allowed artists, especially pop artists to get away with performance crimes for years. Tour managers and production outfits push the limits daily on what they can get away with during a live performance.

Lip syncing, what about play syncing? (Play syncing being musicians who perform live but are not really playing their instruments.) Soul Train and American Bandstand were notorious for allowing both lip and play syncing.

The pop superstar Beyoncé’s appearance at President Obama’s second inauguration was immediately declared a rip-roaring success, an outstanding, nuanced, soulful and contemporary delivery of America’s hard-to-sing, two-octave-spanning national anthem. Such a bravura performance from a modern R&B icon certainly reflected well on the hippest president in history, as well as helping to return Beyoncé to the public eye on her post-maternity comeback. Only one little detail may come to haunt them both: the accusation from members of her Marine Corps backing band that she was miming.Frankly, it is hard to tell from the footage. Beyoncé performs with a great big furry microphone obscuring her mouth, but her body language is that of a singer in full flow, down to the flamboyant discarding of her in-ear monitor as she goes for the big notes. The silence from Beyoncé’s camp regarding the accusations is, at the time of writing, deafening.

To Lip Sync – A Fair Exchange?

Maybe it’s a fair exchange for artists to lip-sync and play-sync. They lose countless dollars of income to piracy. Maybe a performance crime is an attempt to level the playing field. You still my music, I’ll give you a half ass performance. This is not to say that an artist is doing this intentionally, but rather an unconscious reflex.

Perhaps this is the future of music, fake performances for fake compensation. Beyoncé’s performance probably doesn’t fit into this category, she was just lazy. She should at least practice fooling people, especially on such a large stage.